Familiar Shoals for America’s Cup: A Spat Over Rules

The America’s Cup appeared to have regained momentum in San Francisco Bay in September 2013, but 19 months later, it looks in need of a gust of wind.

The last Cup ended with one of the most remarkable comebacks in any sport as Oracle Team USA, only one race from defeat, rose from the depths of an 8-1 deficit against Emirates Team New Zealand to defend the Cup with eight straight victories.

It was thrilling as well as spectacular because it was contested in 72-foot foiling catamarans with wing sails that often looked more like flying machines than yachts. Yet for all the risks, the outcome seemed to create a solid platform for a venerable sailing event that had been badly rattled by legal disputes, declining interest from challengers and, worst of all, the death of the British sailor Andrew Simpson in a training accident a few months earlier.

Instead, the Cup, which dates to 1851, has returned to too-familiar waters with more squabbles, money worries, challenger withdrawals and controversial changes. There are also concerns about the Cup’s relevance and appeal in a global sports marketplace full of sharp elbows and much easier sells.

Luna Rossa, the Italian team that has been one of the pillars of the modern Cup, withdrew this month. Its owner, Patrizio Bertelli, who runs the Italian company Prada, disapproved of the challengers’ vote to downsize to 48-foot catamarans for the next Cup, in Bermuda in 2017. (The rules for 2017 had previously provided for 62-foot catamarans.)

Team New Zealand, another pillar, is also not yet a sure thing.

Team Alinghi, led by the Swiss billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli, had been a mainstay of the competition but has not returned since it lost the Cup to Oracle in 2010, after a long legal battle with the Oracle team owner Larry Ellison.

“I hope the world gets to understand that when I’m not racing, and when Bertelli pulls the plug, when Team New Zealand is struggling, it is all because these people do not behave like sportsmen,” Bertarelli said in a telephone interview. “Sports is about setting rules, having an independent referee and going at each other fairly.”

Some Oracle officials and sailors, including the skipper James Spithill, argued that to the contrary, the goal was a more equitable Cup in which more teams would have a chance to take part and be competitive.

With Alinghi as defender, the full-scale Cup in 2007 in Valencia, Spain, had 11 challengers. There were three in 2013, and for now, there are only four for 2017.

“It’s a real shame; I consider Patrizio Bertelli a friend, a good friend,” said Spithill, formerly the helmsman for Luna Rossa. “But I truly believe we have to think about the future of the event. And the bigger boats, we’ve kind of proven the last couple of Cups that while sure, they are pretty spectacular, it just really is unsustainable. We need to attract new teams, and we want to have a boat now that is locked in for the next Cup after this one.”

It should be noted, in the litigious context of the Cup, that no formal agreement yet exists to contest the next edition after 2017 in the same 48-foot catamarans.

Bertarelli and Bertelli maintained that the problem for this round was not the smaller boat, which most viewers will have difficulty distinguishing from a 62-footer on television, but changing the rules midstream. Bertelli, who has now officially withdrawn and is dismantling his team’s base in Cagliari, Italy, believed he had a design advantage with the 62-foot boat, called the AC62, before the switch.

“You can’t have a guy spending 26 million, hiring the best sailors, being ahead of the game on a 62-footer and then halfway through the game change the rules,” Bertarelli said.

Spithill said Oracle might have been even further ahead on designing its AC62 than Luna Rossa.

But Ben Ainslie, head of the challenger Ben Ainslie Racing, said that the change was necessary, if not ideally timed. He said it was justified because it came after a majority vote of the challenger committee, whose creation Luna Rossa actually initiated, thus voluntarily ceding some of its rights as challenger of record.

“That is the irony of it,” said Ainslie, the British sailing star who was a key member of Oracle’s winning crew in 2013 and has since launched his own Cup team.

The move to Bermuda also rankled in some quarters. Rather than defend the Cup in 2017 in the United States, Ellison and his lieutenant Russell Coutts, the former Oracle skipper who is now director of the America’s Cup Event Authority, chose to take the financial and organizational guarantees on offer and move the event off shore.

“The whole thing is very selfishly done,” Malin Burnham, the American sailor and businessman who led San Diego’s unsuccessful bid, said. “And it’s terrible, especially with Larry Ellison. He doesn’t need the money.”

Ellison, who co-founded and then ran Oracle Corporation, is one of the world’s wealthiest people. But he has spent, by some estimates, more than $500 million pursuing, winning and defending the oldest major trophy in yachting. He was disappointed with the city of San Francisco’s approach to hosting the America’s Cup, and money is clearly a factor in many of the Cup leadership’s recent decisions and current problems.

Coutts, a New Zealander with a strong chin and a strong personality, is the most successful helmsman in the modern history of the Cup. He was adamant that the decision to choose Bermuda was sound and in the best interests of the event and the television coverage in Europe (Bermuda is four hours ahead of San Diego). He has also denied, contrary to Burnham’s assertions, that tax benefits played a significant role in the decision.

Two challengers of record have now withdrawn in the last year. Of the four remaining — Team France, Ben Ainslie Racing, Artemis Racing and Team New Zealand — only Artemis appeared fully assured of its funding at this stage. Team New Zealand was in the midst of a legal tussle over the Cup organizer’s decision to cut costs for other challengers by canceling a preliminary regatta in Auckland, New Zealand.

Hopes for a compromise with Luna Rossa have faded, and a spokesman for Bertelli confirmed Sunday that the team was dismantling its base in Cagliari, on the Italian island Sardinia, where a preliminary Cup regatta scheduled for June had already been canceled.

A lawsuit by Luna Rossa to recover damages was not out of the question. If Team New Zealand also withdraws, it will be hard to argue that the late-in-the-game switch to a smaller boat was worth the fallout.

“Ideally, no question you’d keep Luna Rossa in the game,” Coutts said. “But I think we will definitely see other teams coming in because of the boat change, and I can tell you there’s a Japanese team coming in, and when you see who the owner of that team is, you would debate whether it’s bigger or smaller than Luna Rossa.”

Ellison declined to be interviewed, but Coutts insisted that Ellison, although less involved with the Oracle sailing team, was still engaged.

“He’s very involved with the event side of things,” said Coutts, who added that Ellison called him shortly after seeing video of 45-foot prototype boats that were built and launched recently by Oracle and Artemis. “I sent him the link, and within a few minutes he called me and said, ‘Why don’t we consider racing the America’s Cup in these boats?’ But he wasn’t the only one.”

The 48-foot catamarans are expected to prove less costly than the 62-foot boats because they are easier to fit into shipping containers and require a smaller crew (six instead of eight). With a number of prescribed design elements, including hull and wing-sail shape, they are also expected to reduce research and development costs while still leaving room for innovation in other areas such as foil design.

Ainslie said the smaller boat “still has the wow factor.” Coutts estimated that a start-up campaign for the next Cup might be able to take part for $30 million.

“I’m absolutely certain nobody would have spent less than $100 million,” Coutts said of the 2013 Cup. “And clearly that’s just ridiculous.”

Coutts said that he still hoped to have six challengers in Bermuda and that even if Team New Zealand were to withdraw — which he deemed unlikely — another team from New Zealand would most likely fill the breach.

“Others would put a New Zealand team together because frankly they have the components of a very competitive team, more so under this rule,” he said. “They have a great sailing team, and this rule favors a great sailing team.”

The question, as the America’s Cup sails through its latest storm, is how many potentially great teams will ultimately choose to remain on shore.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D7 of the New York edition with the headline: Familiar Shoals: A Spat Over Rules. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe